Portside

Chicago poet Nathan Hoks shows a keen understanding of bad things going on in our times and then takes it all a surreal step beyond or maybe not.

For the novelty fetishists, everything's new, new, new. Boston-based poet Jill McDonough shines a light on what's happening, what's coming. Only maybe not.

Nothing more clearly shows the absurdity and evil of the Vietnam War and yet the subsequent successful invasion of capitalism in a country ostensibly an enemy state than John Daniel's new poem.

New York poet Howie Good, winner of the Prize Americana for poetry in 2015, opens a window to a natural world--"Some Sort of Shining"-- that's always there, but seldom seen.

Brooklyn poet Ally Malinenko offers a sardonic/graphic expose of East Germany's nostalgia for the old days.

New Zealand poet John Sweden describes life as "seamless," meaning that the human-made divisions of nationality, ethnicity, even bodily labels and ego, are part of seamless flow that transcends one's life. .

In this bittersweet poem, Tony Gloeggler, a New York City poet, draws on his experience working with developmentally disabled people to explore the tentative nature of relationships.

James Scruton dedicates this poem about his own white-collar labors to the late Philip Levine, the poet who celebrated working-class people who spent their lives “digging or pounding…wrenching or drilling.”

"in a world where war is the natural state of affairs," writes the New York poet David Lehman, the unthinkable surrounds us all--the ones with "dough," "the refugee who cannot lost his German accent," even those whose aim is "to live at peace."

From Alexis Rhone Fancher"s State of Grace (2015), an elegy to her son Joshua, we find compassion mixed with irony, grief with dark humor, as the poet's life must go in an absurd world.